Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 20

Why do I Continue to Blog and You Should too

I have been writing on this blog for more than 12 years and this is my 851st post. I wanted to reflect on the experience. For a variety of reasons (some known and some unknown), this blog never became popular nor did I get significant number of visitors. I do not make any money from the blog. So, my friends, family and colleagues have asked me many a times the question: If you are not making money of this, why do this at all? What is your purpose of spending so much time and effort on writing an...

Celebrating 25 Women Who Influenced and Shaped My Thinking And Work

I wanted to take this opportunity this International Women’s day to recognise and thank women who have had a significant impact on my thinking in my professional life. I have also been fortunate enough to host many brilliant women as part of my podcast – “Pushing Beyond the Obvious) and want to take the opportunity to thank them for the time and insights they shared with me. Here we go: 1. Bernadette Jiwa I have learnt more about marketing and more importantly story telling from Bernadette than ...

Let Creative Ideas Surface

I was talking to someone earlier today about creativity and the need for creative ideas to drive innovation to enable us to solve difficult problems like climate change and achieving the SDG goals.. I was surprised when he said, that he was not the creative type and that he finds it really difficult to come up with creative ideas and so avoids participating in brainstorming sessions.. I strongly and fully believe that we are all born creative and “Deep inside us, creative ideas are already there...

Leadership and Responsibility

In a recent article,  Pia Lauritzen shared her insights on how leaders can create a sense of responsibility across their organisation. The key insight is that they can do so by smart use of questions – questions that shift the responsibility from them “Me” (self) to “You” (individual) to “Us”. I think she is on to something here. Taking all the responsibility on ourselves makes us feel like a hero or a martyr but doesnt necessarily help us achieve what we set out to. Making our employees respons...

Mindsets to Thrive in 2023

The agility and ability to switch between mindsets are what will set you apart from everyone around you and enable you to thrive in any given condition.

Always be Recruiting

One of our primary responsibilities as leaders is to assemble the best team possible to achieve the results that we want to achieve as a team. This means that we are constantly looking to figure out what kind of person can elevate the performance of the team as a whole. Once we understand this, we can then be always on the lookout for the talent that we need. You will be surprised how you can find the right talent in all the potentially wrong places or places where we are not looking. The key he...

The Law of the Loaf

One of the responsibilities of leaders is to organise our people and create contexts within which they operate. This context has a significant impact on the results that the teams can achieve. One way we put in place these contexts is through the culture we operate under (intentionally or unintentionally). And this decides how we interact with each other – as one entity moving toward the goal or as individuals working on each our own goals. It is fairly evident that we are much more effective wh...

How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all...

How Not to Slowdown Progress

Leo Szilard, in his book – The voice of the dolphins, and other stories has a short story titled The Mark Gable Foundation. In this short story, there is a conversation between two characters, one of who thinks that the pace of scientific change is too fast and is seeking ideas on how to slow it down. Here is their exchange: “I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with mon...

Streets, Roads, Stroads and Leadership Effectiveness

I was listening to a podcast episode on 99% Invisible hosted by the inimitable Roman Mars and they were talking about Stroads, which piqued my curiousity. So, today, we will explore this topic but from a leadership lens. Before we go ahead, I think it makes sense for us to define each one of these terms and what it means. Roads: A road is defined as a medium to move vehicles (cars, trucks, etc) from one point to another as quickly as possible. By this definition, all your highways and express wa...